"Open libraries or closed minds"

A NYTimes Op-Ed highlights the fight (spearheaded by CodePink) to keep the last library in Salinas open, urging Laura Bush to join the campaign to prioritize funding for literacy and education.

"As globalization takes hold, American workers have more competition than ever before from well-educated, hard-working people in places like India and China. For the United States to maintain its standing and its standard of living, it needs to make a greater commitment to books, literacy training, materials on English as a second language, and all of the other services libraries provide."

Thomas Friedman also stresses the dire need for prioritizing education, out of America's own competitive self interest as a declining superpower in an increasingly cutthroat global labor market. He gets that education is important, but he paints a simplistic, excessively rosy "it's a small world after all"-esque picture of the globalized planet (which he's apparently just woken up to), where the playing field is level between first and third worlds, and everyone in India is content, with their wireless internet enabled laptops. Nevermind the one billion that are impoverished and the sharp stratification between the rich and the penniless.